Cleopatra: Last Queen of Egypt »

Joyce Tyldesley holds a first class honors degree in archaeology from Liverpool University, and a doctorate from Oxford University. She is currently Honorary Research Fellow at Liverpool University, and a tutor at Manchester University. She lives in Bolton, England.

A vivid biography of the ancient world’s most famous queen.

Publishers Weekly

This entertaining biography hits the elusive sweet spot between scholarship and readability. British archeologist Tyldesley (Daughters of Isis) is charmingly transparent about the unreliability of her sources. She tells us that when the Roman poet Lucan describes Cleopatra's "ineffable night of shame" with Julius Caesar, he is "writing the equivalent of modern tabloid journalism." In spite of the lack of eyewitness descriptions of Cleopatra, the question, for instance, of what she looked like becomes a fast-moving amusing discussion of statuary as royal propaganda, the modern perception of Cleopatra's nose as way too big and the difference between beauty and sexiness. Writing with an easy mastery of her subject, Tyldesley always seems to be able to lay her hands on the perfect lively detail, whether an excerpt from an obscure bureaucratic document or a description of a kind of giant robot that paraded through the streets of Alexandria pouring libations of milk from a gold bottle. Though she makes it clear we'll never know what Cleopatra was "really" like, Tyldesley provides a memorable journey through the rich and contradictory sources of our knowledge about her. 8 pages of illus., 3 maps. (Sept.)

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Family tree

Maps

Ch. 1 Princess of Egypt 10

Ch. 2 Queen of Egypt 41

Ch. 3 Alexandria-next-to-Egypt 70

Ch. 4 Cleopatra and Julius Caesar 94

Ch. 5 The New Isis 109

Ch. 6 Cleopatra and Mark Antony 140

Ch. 7 Death of a Dream 171

Ch. 8 Cleopatra's Children 197

Ch. 9 History Becomes Legend 205

Who Was Who? 218

Chronology 239

Notes 241

Bibliography 260

List of Illustrations 266

Cartouches 268

Acknowledgements 269

Index 270